


all the things we did not become

by autoclaves



Category: bare: A Pop Opera - Hartmere/Intrabartolo
Genre: (not all of these tags apply to every character), Canon LGBTQ Character, Catholicism, Character Development, Character Study, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Abortion, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Introspection, Loss of Faith, Platonic Relationships, Post-Canon, Religious Guilt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-07
Updated: 2020-04-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 02:28:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23527645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/autoclaves/pseuds/autoclaves
Summary: Jason dies, and four different people choose to live.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 23





	all the things we did not become

**Author's Note:**

> i watched the 2013 la revival of bare three days ago, wrote + edited this using every spare minute of my time, and am so sick of looking at it now. enjoy folks xx
> 
> title credit is in the epigraph!

_How can something be there, and then not be there? How do we forgive ourselves for all the things we did not become?_

“14 Lines from Love Letters or Suicide Notes”, Doc Luben

—

Peter goes west the day after graduation. 

He declines Berkeley and commits to San Francisco State University instead, because the former feels too much like part of the plans he’d made with Jason. His mother doesn’t say anything about this decision. She hugs him tentatively before he leaves, tells him to call home if anything happens. Peter nods, and knows it’ll be a while before he can bring himself to do that—she is trying, but he still remembers what happened the last time he called.

Because a single costs extra, he rooms with another freshman called Alex, a political science and engineering double major. Once the school year starts, they awkwardly exchange greetings and move in together. Every night, Peter braces against the empty strangeness of sleeping alone in a dorm bed after being with Jason so long. Every night, the ache of it eases a little bit, and he forgets that much more.

California is sunny. California is big and wide-open and smells like the sea. He is anonymous here; there is room enough to grieve.

He comes out to Alex late at night when Alex is frantically finishing a homework packet due in six hours and Peter is writing up an essay for his Comm Theory class. 

It goes something like this:

“Jihye Lee keeps on trying to catch your eye.”

“Er. Sure?”

“You should ask her out. She’s sweet, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, but I’m—gay.” 

“Oh. Okay.”

There’s a pause, and his hands shake uncontrollably.

“If that makes things awkward—”

“I really don’t care, Peter. It’s chill. Just tell me when you bring someone over.” 

_You have to give the world a chance,_ he remembers yelling. And now he is here to see the world take it, and Jason is not. Would it have mattered at all?

The breeze spills through their open dorm window, bringing with it raucous laughter from the next building. Alex writes an equation, scratches it out, and curses in three different languages. Peter exhales hard.

The Tuesday after that, he attends the first meeting of SFSU’s Queer Alliance with his pulse hurrying through his ears. 

On the little laminated nametag he’s given, he scrawls out _Peter_ and _he/him_ in the right categories _._ After a second, he also adds _gay_ to fill in the optional sexuality section at the bottom. He sticks it onto his t-shirt and sits down; nothing world-changing happens. He thinks of Jason, of bringing him here and showing him this roomful of people who have variations on the word _queer_ pinned to their clothes like it’s something to be proud of. 

He starts going every week, and it does get easier each time. Two months in, someone starts a discussion about suicide rates among LGBTQ adolescents. 

Priya, one of the senior leaders, comments on how the institutionalization of homophobia and transphobia leads to social alienation. Someone else jumps in to name religious fundamentalism as one such example, and Peter’s hands turn white as he clutches the edge of his desk.

He leaves the room halfway through the discussion. To his dismay, someone else is already outside the classroom they take their meetings in, sitting down in the hallway with their back against the wall.

When Peter doesn’t leave immediately, instead lingering just outside the door, their head jerks up to eye him warily. “What’re you doing standing out here?”

“Yourself?” Peter deflects, not particularly wanting to get into it at the moment.

They sigh, a noisy theatrical exhale. “Dead girlfriend, if you must know. Meeting was a bit triggering for me.” They sigh again, and this time it’s almost unbearably soft.

“Oh—what, you too?” he says, momentarily startled. Then it strikes him what a horrible, comedic, horribly comedic response that is, how morbid this whole situation is, and starts laughing helplessly. “Sorry, sorry, just. It’s not everyday that this happens.”

“I’m Cal. They/them pronouns,” the other student offers, looking up at him. There’s the beginnings of a sardonic smile on their face too. “You can sit down. We should make a support group out here.”

Peter sits down. The wall is cold linoleum against his back. His Queer Alliance nametag crinkles. “Peter, he and him pronouns,” he introduces himself.

“So, uh, your girlfriend is dead, too?”

“My boyfriend. He… he killed himself. At the end of the semester last year.”

“I’m sorry,” Cal says. “That’s shitty, that’s so shitty.”

“Yeah, well.” He pauses. “His name was Jason,” Peter tells them. He thinks maybe it’s the first time he’s said Jason’s name out loud since it happened, too scared that voicing it would—make it realer, maybe. A habit leftover from their years of secret-keeping. He used to never talk about Jason, afraid that the affection in his words would betray the truth, and he’s finding that his mouth stalls around the name like a familiar motion. It’s even easier to let it slip away now that Jason is dead and cannot remind him with his presence.

“Before he died he said that we’d just have to trust in the world, that it would get better.” Once he starts, he can’t stop, the words choking out of him. He can’t even tell if he’s crying or not. “He never wanted to own up to the fact that he was gay and we never told anyone. I loved him so much.” All of it comes rushing forward now, all that unspent love in the form of an animal kind of grief.

“I want to think that it gets better for us, I really do, but I’m still waiting.”

Cal puts a hand on his shoulder. “Her name was Aline,” they say, and the two of them let that settle in the echoing silence of the hallway. Dead names in dead air, survived by the ones that loved them: quietly, like it hadn’t been a crime.

—

Ivy cries for two days, picks herself up, and goes to the clinic alone. 

The attending nurse is kind enough, but she doesn’t remember enough of the day to truly appreciate her sympathy. She drifts in a daze the entire bus ride back home. It should feel different, shouldn’t it? An emptiness, a _lacking,_ a clear before and after demarcated by what happened—something.

She feels nothing. She feels relief, mostly. 

Nadia won’t look at her when Ivy tells her, right after their mess of a graduation. She has to force the words out, but she thinks Jason’s sister should know. 

“I know it was the last living part of him,” she goes on, throat seizing. She can’t find it in herself to properly mourn the loss _—unwanted unwanted unwanted,_ something inside her screams—and she wonders what that makes her. “I know it’s a sin. And I’m sorry if that’s what you need to hear. But—”

Nadia shakes her head. “They said—they said what Jason was doing was a sin, too. And they were wrong, and now he’s _dead.”_ She flinches, as if she’d scared even herself with the force of that statement.

She finally turns to properly look at Ivy, and her eyes are red-rimmed but clear. She goes on in a rush, “It wasn’t a sin and you weren’t being selfish. You don’t need forgiveness for it.”

Ivy feels the tears pricking her eyes. She’d promised herself that she would stop after two days but her lips tremble anyway, and she twists them tightly in an effort to hide it. Nadia reaches out to embrace her.

“Are you going to tell Peter?” she asks after a second, both arms winding around Nadia’s warm body. 

“Only if you want me to. And you don’t have to tell him, either.”

“Okay,” she says, quietly. She feels very, very young. Too young.

“I think he’s left already. He wasn’t at the afterparty,” Nadia adds. “He told me he plans on staying with a friend of his mother’s in California until college starts.”

“I don’t blame him. For leaving.” Ivy would like nothing more than to leave right now. She draws in a shaky breath. “You have his email, though, right? I’ll send him something. And he can ignore it if he wants.”

“Okay,” says Nadia. “That’s a start.”

So Ivy emails Peter. She apologizes for how she’d hurt him, tells him about the abortion, tells him about how she misses Jason’s smile. Apologizes again, and tells him that it turns out she didn’t know much about Jason at all, except for that he must have really loved Peter. It’s a blunt, messy email and she doesn’t know how to end it, so she just signs it with her name and leaves it at that.

Peter replies the same evening, a long, grief-strewn message just as messy as her own. He apologizes, too, telling her about the things he wishes he’d done differently, about hurting so much he can’t sleep, about how bright and pretty Jason’s eyes were when he smiled. Like Nadia, he insists that she needs no forgiveness for going through with an abortion.

 _Despite all of it, I still pray every night. What does that make me? Why do we run back to the things that hurt us and believe in their redemption?_ he says at the very end of it.

Ivy spends an hour staring at those words, until her head is spinning from the dim glow of the screen. _My God is one that loves, and so is yours. We are more than the things that hurt us. I hope you’ll stay in touch,_ she finally writes back in response to that, and hits send.

They do in fact stay in touch, albeit sporadically.

Instead of going to college, she takes a gap year and flies to California. It turns out she and Peter are of the same mind—westwards, away from this place. 

Ivy ends up in Malibu, where she rents a shitty apartment with three other girls and holds down two jobs until she finds an entry-level editorial position as an illustrator. She cuts her hair into choppy waves and gets a tan. It suits her, she’s told by multiple people. Sometimes she goes to Mass, when she can bear to. 

In the evenings, Ivy volunteers at a local theatre program, painting sets and moving props and once, even understudying a role for one of their smaller-scale productions: Harper from _Angels in America,_ the irony of which is not at all lost on her. Maybe at some point in the future, she will be able to laugh about it without hurting.

She stands in the spotlight during the final act of her first performance and monologues about the thousand ineffable intricacies of the world, the dead and the living that inhabit it.

 _In this world, there’s a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead_ , she says, eyes focused on an imaginary point beyond the horizon. And she believes it as much as the audience that watches her, rapt.

—

Nadia writes the first letter to him because the school tells her to, and the second letter because she’s drunk. Then they just keep on coming, even after she graduates, even after she leaves home and goes to Bennington for a performing arts degree, even after the period of time she’d assigned herself to be miserable and dysfunctional for has long since lapsed.

_Dear Jason, there will be tears today, but we’ll get through. Dear Jason, how could you? Dear Jason, I think I always knew, but I was too scared to bring it up before. Dear Jason, I should have said something. Dear Jason, I can hear him crying, he loved you as much as I did. Dear Jason, last night I was awake thinking about everything I could have done better and maybe you wouldn’t be dead if I had actually done those things. Dear Jason, I’m sorry. Dear Jason, I’m sorry. Dear Jason, I’m so sorry—_

The on-campus therapist reassures her that it’s a coping mechanism, and a normal part of the grieving process. Nadia doesn’t feel normal. She feels like she’s flying apart.

She tries GHB exactly once, when she’s at her lowest. It makes her feel like floating. It makes her feel closer to Jason. The thought has her wanting to throw up, so she does, repeatedly, until she’s just dry-heaving sobs into the toilet. Nadia swears off drugs after that.

Every Sunday, she very pointedly does not go to church and swears as many times as she can. She yells at another student for throwing around a slur, the same one that was directed at her brother. 

“There’s so much anger inside of you,” her therapist says gently during one of their sessions. “Anger can be productive, anger can be cathartic, but you are letting it dictate your life, Nadia. You need to find some outlet for it that doesn’t hurt yourself or others.”

“Some people deserve to be hurt,” Nadia retorts.

“But don’t other people deserve to be saved? Isn’t that of equal, if not greater, importance?”

Nadia bites her lip and says nothing. Oddly enough, she dreams about Jason that night. He hugs her from behind, laughing the way he did when they were kids, and for a moment, she has a brother again. 

_Dear Jason, I spent so long trying to save you, but nothing I do has brought you back._

She records a sizzle reel of songs from _Next to Normal_ for her next project in Performance Studies. She cuts and compiles the material herself; writes a rambling introduction about the inherent humanity in grieving and healing and forgetting and holding oneself together throughout it all. She sings it all in a single take. 

Her professor is so impressed that he asks her if he can send it to a contact in the theatre community looking to cast several roles she may be a good fit for. Dubious, she nods an affirmation. 

Two months later she gets an email soliciting a second audition, and a month after that, she hears back from them again: _Dear Nadia McConnell, we are endlessly pleased to offer you the part of Elphaba in our upcoming regional production of Wicked._

Her roommate leaps to hug her when she finds out, even though they’ve never been particularly close. “Congratulations, leading lady!” she yells, and Nadia grins wildly into her shoulder.

 _Dear Jason,_ she writes that same night, penmanship slow and careful on a sheet of A4 paper. _You’ll never believe the role I landed. I think you’d be proud of me…_

Nadia signs the letter with a goodbye. She folds it up, seals the envelope, and slides it carefully into her desk drawer. 

—

Matt gets into Notre Dame off the waitlist. He receives his letter the day after Jason dies—the cruelest coincidence, or some sick act of God. 

He remembers resenting Jason for his EA acceptance, knowing that even if he got in with a regular decision, he would still be second to Jason. Now this distinction seems pointless. What is the use of competing against a dead man, a dead friend?

His parents congratulate him buoyantly, such a whiplash contrast to everyone’s smothering grief that Matt feels awkward in the midst of their praises. The three of them only address Jason’s suicide in the most oblique of terms.

“A terrible tragedy for everyone involved,” his father says. 

“Matthew, you said he was—confused. One of those types,” his mother says. “It was bound to happen.”

“We’ll pray for his soul,” they both agree, decisively. They nod at each other as if satisfied in this mutual resolve.

Matt should be taking consolation from those words. _It was bound to happen._ It absolves him of responsibility easily, the reassurance that Jason would have met his untimely end regardless of Matt’s actions. He had just been confused and had lost his way and is in a better place, pardoned of his sins now. 

He ends up turning away from the conversation feeling more upset.

Jason had been confused and had lost his way and—and would be much better off alive, with the people who cared for him. And if he was so confused, so hurting, then why did nobody help? Do they not all share the responsibility of failing to speak up, as much he does for failing to hold his tongue?

Peter loved him, Matt knows that much. He doesn’t understand what that entails, really, but it shouldn’t have mattered that he doesn’t.

He leaves a voicemail for Peter, and one for Nadia, where he says all these things very hesitantly and very quietly into the receiver. He’s wary of finishing his sentences nowadays, not knowing what will happen once the words are out. 

Peter responds. Nadia doesn’t. Surprisingly enough, Ivy reaches out to him, too, despite the fact that all he’s done after graduation is try his best to disappear. 

Somehow, slowly but surely, summer turns over into fall.

Notre Dame is beautiful in September, and devastatingly underwhelming at the same time. Matt goes mainly to please his parents. He is under no illusion about the fact that it is a Catholic-majority institution, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this similar to St. Cecilia’s. It’s jarring, almost, like he’s once again back at the start of four years of high school.

He attends classes, attends Mass. He doesn’t tell anyone about his crisis of faith. There is no pressure to actively practice, but still, the implication is there in the crucifixes watching from the walls and his parents’ calls from home.

“Forgive me Father, for I have sinned,” he says into the dark of the confession booth one day.

“God is merciful. He will forgive you, whatever you have done.”

“I took a life, Father. Forgiveness isn’t going to bring him back.” And the story spills out of him in pieces, the culmination of weeks and weeks of silence. 

“My deepest condolences for your loss. To lose someone so young is a great tragedy,” the priest murmurs from the other side of the confessional. “It sounds like he had been at a very tumultuous time in his life, a position that he could no longer see his way out of. Perhaps it will give you faith to understand that he is in a better place now.” 

Matt tries not to bristle at the platitudes, the ones he’s heard over and over again. He’s been trying to see past them to the guidance they must surely contain, but it gets harder every time he is told another version of the same story. The priest on the other side of the wall sounds genuinely saddened, though, the way Father Flynn and Sister Chantelle had been. It makes this all the more difficult. How can it be that the same Church which had a hand in Jason’s death is so kind about it? Wouldn’t it be easier if the world could delineate its guilty and their victims in some unquestionable way? 

“Then why didn’t someone help him? Isn’t that the Church’s responsibility, to offer empathy and respect instead of—just telling him he was guilty? Instead of trying to change him?”

“The Church defines certain acts as sins, yes. However, God believes in forgiveness. Your friend was young, and he had time to change. The teachers of your school were merely trying to facilitate that change, as gently as possible.”

“But _why_ would it have been a sin, Father? Peter was one of my best friends at school and Jason was a good person. They cared about each other, why does that constitute a sin?”

He doesn’t get a clear answer that day. Or the day after, or the day after. He dissects religious texts over and over through the lenses of social change, political change, history, literature. And justice. Always justice, trying to understand how religion heals and kills and who is left suffering from it all. Who is responsible for it all.

(He never comes up with an answer to that, either. Not when he applies for a transfer program with a secular college, not when he graduates law school, not even years later when he finds himself prosecuting the grey-area killers of children in court.)

Sometimes there is no answer to be found.

**Author's Note:**

> some Notes (TM):  
> \- this takes place in an ambiguous time period with a timeline that will fall apart under scrutiny, don't think too much about it  
> \- doc luben performing [the poem](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy4cEW15SdE) that the title and epigraph are from; the ambiguity of love letter/suicide note also a reference to the jason's lines in bare  
> \- nadia singing next to normal and ivy performing as harper are to some degree inspired by their respective character arcs  
> tumblr: @doctortwelfth


End file.
